Masters – by Andrei Seleznev
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The novel was in Russian, that was the problem. Everyone else in my book club had a translation, but I’d wanted to show off, not realising my mother tongue had atrophied. I wasn’t even halfway through. The other problem was that reading Russian on the train felt suspect. What if passengers clocked on to the Cyrillic? I imagined absurd scenes: is that really and how dare you, angry calls to my employer. Only my train crush, two seats ahead in impeccable slacks, wouldn’t care. She’d be unflappable.
I kept reading the same sentence: We’re all servants, each of our actions serves some master… My master was, naturally, my train crush. Every second Tuesday after work, I’d take the V/Line to the book club, and she’d board a stop after mine, same time, same carriage. We’d smile at each other. We never said a word.
The train clattered to the Macedon Ranges. Crooked fences, powerlines. We’d almost reached her station when stopped in the middle of the tracks.
‘We’ve an incident up ahead,’ the intercom said. ‘Settle in.’
My train crush was at the doors, mashing a button. I had to pee but couldn’t murder the moment. Hell. I approached.
‘The machine’s indifferent to your plea,’ I said. ‘They justify it as a safety thing.’
‘Christ,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to jump out. I want to vape.’
‘Vape here.’
‘I can’t. There’re kids around.’
‘I’ll distract them. I can make farting sounds with my armpit.’
She looked me up and down. I sensed a complex evaluation in process.
‘Where’s your accent from?’ she asked.
I liked that question until February 2022, six months ago. Of my native country I had mixed memories, and though I tried to remember the nice (Mum chopping beetroot, cartoons about a rabbit) I didn’t have a solid identity so much as my own specific history and a fondness for talking about myself. But, since the war, a horrible creature had come to appear in my dreams. It was a drum, but with sinewy legs sticking out the bottom, grotesque little arms, and a torso that was a snare it played with meaty palms, rat-a-tat-tat. Fuck off, I’d say to it. Do I need to burn my passport on TikTok? I did see a guy do this. Not on TikTok. It’d made Channel 7 news, the first anti-invasion protest. I’d been there in the flesh. We’re here with Moscow-born Vasily, Human Resources Officer from Toorak, who in protest of Russia’s invasion and so on. It took our pancake-faced hero a dozen goes with a zippo to set the thing alight. I’m full-time Australian now, he announced to the nation. That easy, was it?
‘Accent’s foreign,’ I said.
‘You’re trying to make me guess.’
‘I’m trying to dodge the question.’
‘Sure,’ she said, glancing at my book, ‘comrade’.
Her name was Steph. We sat and talked about our jobs, which neither one of us liked. I told her how I worked marketing, this not-for-profit, kids with cancer. It sounded neat but like all marketing gigs it was excruciating,
‘You’ll hate this,’ she said. ‘I’m an accountant at Philip Morris.’
‘The tobacco company?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you get free smokes?’
‘I vape. Keep up.’
‘Do you get free vapes?’
Steph didn’t. When she got home from work, all she could do was get high and watch films. We talked about old movies we liked: Bertolucci, Pasolini. We talked about whether things had been better in the old days. You whittled a spear, roamed for elephants with the crew. You went twig-gathering under the protection of Brother Moon. You threshed wheat for your liege-lord until an angry knight came and killed you. Now we suffered through Zoom meetings and were anxious all the time because we had all this information that didn’t mean anything! What’s your number, I said. Nah, she replied, but give me yours.
She had a face like a good spring day. Everything was great except I really needed to pee.
‘How’d you end up at Philip Morris?’ I asked.
She rolled her eyes. It wasn’t playful. ‘You want my CV, or you want me to assuage your inner scold?’
‘Neither, I just want to vibe.’
‘That’s not the way to do it.’
‘Okay, hold further thoughts,’ I said. I was desperate. ‘I need to slash. Recommence vibing on return?’
When I got back from the toilet she was gone. I laughed, thinking she’d crouched behind a seat, or something. Nope. I checked under each one. The train gave a rumble and began to move.
The book club was in a cosy country house: wind-chimes on the porch, bookshelves everywhere. Hosts Bo and Jacinta served vegan lasagne on earthenware plates.
Before we were a book club we’d been a writing group. It was sad how seriously we’d taken ourselves: unmanageable routines (I’d wake at four to work on an idiotic novel), brutal intellectual warfare at our workshops. At a certain point it became clear we all hated the experience and no-one was getting published. The idea got floated that we talk about books instead of writing them. Writers used to be rakish heroes and now they were resentful internet addicts but books were still special. That’s how I’d put it, anyway, campaigning for a shift to a book club, frightened of losing my friends.
Amid the convivial faces, flickering candles, lasagne and wine, I was out of sorts, sheepish about not finishing the book. I drank hastily. I told everyone about Steph.
‘Beauty,’ said Bo, a former youth pastor, ‘is a crisis. You’re on your way to pick up milk and you see a Caravaggio. How can you go on?’
‘People used to want salvation,’ Jacinta said. ‘Now they want respite. A quiet dark place in which to sweetly ruminate on a missed connection, in lieu of the connection itself.’
‘Maybe she was a ghost,’ said Pia, finest ex-writer in the room.
Philip fucking Morris, how could anybody, and so on, said the others.
We ran the club like this: one person pontificated on the book and was subsequently eviscerated by piercing questions from the gallery. Then the mantle passed onto the next trembling victim. Deep into a bottle of red, I volunteered to begin.
The book was about two sisters, and their lovers, and the Russian revolution. The first part was a romance and the second troop movements and tactics. I began on cavalry charges but soon got confused. We all serve masters, I said. Okay? Every action serves a cause! When you take a shit, you serve! But have you seen the quality of masters on offer?
‘So it doesn’t fucking matter,’ I said ‘if someone works for Phillip Morris. You know what happens in the world? Opiate epidemics! Cluster munitions! I was walloped by a Caravaggio, okay?’
People stared.
‘I keep having this dream,’ I said, ‘about a drum that beats itself. I don’t mean masturbates. It plays a march and hops around. That’s what I put up with! I could use a bit of fun! Also, I didn’t finish the book. Sorry.’
The piercing evisceration didn’t arrive. What made you think the novel was on masters, they said, it’s about communal fate devouring personal fate. Bo talked about combat morale for fifteen minutes. Then it was someone else’s turn.
I went to the kitchen and there was Pia. Of us failed writers, only her work had ever made me cry. Catholic, childless, Italian, single, she worked in a train station, something to do with signals. I’d visited once to collect a book and it stunned me how happy she and her colleagues seemed, drinking coffee in puffer jackets, in a cold office with squeaky floors, paper absolutely everywhere.
‘Exhausting way to live,’ she said, ‘when every deed’s a battle, every word propaganda.’
‘It’s just a theory from a book,’ I said. ‘Is it a bad idea to pursue the train girl?’
‘I’d worry more about that creepy drum.’ She was sorting through wine bottles, scrutinising the labels. She lived a half-hour walk away, could have a few and get home.
‘Yeah. How do you deal?’
‘Me? I’d pray about it’.’
‘Won’t work. I’m agnostic.’
‘Sucks to be you. Here. Help me open this bottle?’
Taking it, I inadvertently brushed her hand. I think she noticed.
Steph got in touch, two days later. I’d given her my number, after all. Its steph I don’t text, she texted, and then called and said — remember how the train stopped? Well! This guy had a heart attack at the station, and there was a defib, but they put it on wrong. Wasn’t that sad? Macedon Ranges Council was running free defibrillator trainings next week. A coincidence, not a reaction.
‘I want to go but not alone,’ she said. ‘See my problem?’
‘So I live in,’ I said, and told her where. It was an hour and a half away.
‘What’s it like?’
‘Speeding utes, chicken shops.’
‘What were you doing on the train?’
‘Going to a book club.’
‘Cute,’ she said. ‘Come up this way again.’
It turned out she’d gone to the toilet in another carriage to vape. Then her phone rang. It was her doctor, she wasn’t going to take the call in front of me! Once she disembarked she’d waved from the platform but I’d been busy looking under seats.
At the training, we learned how to use a defibrillator and provide CPR. Afterwards, we went to the local pub. Crusty sourdough locals knew her by name. She’d bought a house there before lockdown. I could tell an ex was involved, but she deftly avoided mentioning him. Cold pints in the sunshine. We smooched.
Things moved quickly afterwards. We held hands in art galleries, stole kisses on the train. Her friends liked the kids with cancer thing. She didn’t cross paths with the book club crew but was vaguely aware of their existence. I tried some philosophy at her (does every action serve an external agent, Stephanie?), but she wasn’t interested. ‘Masters’, she’d say, for example. ‘Is this a hint you like bondage? I’m not keen, Anton!’
She introduced me to her father, who interrogated me over under-salted roast. What school did you attend — a public one. What do you think of the war — it’s bad. What do your parents do — they’re dead.
‘What football team do you support?’ her dad asked. He was a cardiologist.
‘St Kilda.’
‘A lot like Russia, aren’t they? One tragedy after another.’
‘Dad!’ Steph said. ‘Stop!’
She still worked for Philip Morris. On the drive back to hers, I worked this into the conversation, and in an unkind way.
‘If it’s a problem, say it,’ she told me.
‘It’s a problem.’
‘I’m not going to quit for you.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’re Russian!’
‘So?’
‘That’s bad, too!’
‘If it’s a problem,’ I said, ‘I’ll burn my passport. On TikTok!’
‘Ew,’ she said. ‘I’m not sharing my boyfriend with the internet.’
Wow, I thought. She said that. Awesome.
We were doing the Divine Comedy when I ran into Pia in the kitchen again. She sat on the bench, dangling stockinged legs. I told her about dinner with Steph’s parents. The Saints were actually decent this season!
‘Steph still work for those guys?’
‘Yep.’
‘It’s bothering you?’
‘How do I put it? It’s not a question I’m asking.’
‘What are you asking?’
‘Nothing. I’m raising an inquisitive eyebrow, allowing others to project onto it.’
I was in my cups. We both were. Pia’s hair fell in dignified curls. We stood rather close. She laughed but didn’t dip her eyes. Shit, I thought. Shit, shit. Then the others called for us and we came.
Steph suggested I move somewhere on her train line. Not in with her, just near her. Where I lived was garbage. Also, she said, I need this to feel like it’s going somewhere.
If I moved, I’d be closer to the book club, and to Pia. Wires were crossing. I called Steph Pia by accident, she thought I’d meant ‘pain-in-the-arse’ and teased me while I wilted with shame. This whole shebang was about to burst.
Next book club, I dragged Bo into the backyard.
‘I like Pia, and reckon she likes me. But I also really like who I’m dating.’
‘Cigarette girl?’
‘Her dad’s a cardiologist.’
‘Ask Pia out.’
‘Oh. I thought you’d be, what about the club.’
‘You’ll be responsible. We’ll miss you, if things get awkward.’
‘Hm,’ I said. Responsible. One had to be suspicious of that word. What was I hoping to hear? Pia’s mad about you — I’ve come into a large sum of money and am happy to share — quit your jobs, move here…
Pia moved past the window, then. Pia! Bo called, clowning, waving his arms. She’d stopped to laugh at something, reared her head. Hey! Bo called, Anton’s here! Ask him for a foot rub! Pia!
I dreamt I was on a train. The drum that played itself sat across from me. Up close, it was smaller than you’d think.
‘A man and a woman lived in a tiny flat,’ it said, ‘with a doggy and a baby. Rockets fell, everyone died. Repeat, many times. Face it! Until we find what made you into you, you and all of yours ought to be in the gulag! All your Tolstoys, Dostoevskys, Chekhovs. No-one reads them, anyway. No-one even reads. No-one needs to. We’ve fucking figured things out.’
‘Wasn’t Chekhov Ukrainian?’
‘Exactly! Everything has categories. You belong to a nasty one, Anton. Listen: make yourself as close to dead as possible, but without dying, so nobody feels bad.’
‘Fuck off,’ I told it.
It hopped up excitedly. ‘Don’t like that? Good! Here’s the other option! For the Fatherland — step-march!’
It hopped up excitedly and beat itself with sharp meaty slaps: rat-a-tat-tat-tat. I couldn’t take it. I tackled the drum to the ground, groped across its repulsive warm throbbing torso, while it struggled — not to break free, but to drum — and found the point from whence it breathed and squeezed. It made disgusting choking sounds. I squeezed tighter. There came a soft crunch, a whisper, really, and I had a sickening feeling, like when accidentally biting down on chicken cartilage…
I woke up, panting. I was at Steph’s, in bed, beside her.
‘You were shouting.’ Her hand caressed my chest. ‘In your weird language.’
She kissed me. I became calmer. Things kicked off. When she mounted me, she said the one thing I was long afraid she’d say.
‘Talk dirty in Russian...’
But with each word I got softer — she slid off, mounted me again — until I began to recite prayers, Our Father, the Trisageon, and imagining Steph in a saint’s robes, glowing, saving me, and I hummed Agni Parthene as I burst white-hot into a timeless space.
I moved in with Steph. It made sense, and we both though it’d be hot, and it was. She quit Philip Morris — with me paying rent, she didn’t need money as much — and got a job at Racing Victoria. Sometimes she’d pick me up from book club, and Pia would ask for a ride home. They’d try and talk, but they just couldn’t connect. Foreign lands with incomprehensible tongues.
Other times, I’d leave and Pia would still be with Bo and Jacinta. Laughing, crossing and re-crossing her legs. I’d wave goodbye and they’d wave back without looking.
One drive home, just the two of us, Steph asked, ‘Why don’t you start writing again?’
‘What would I write about?’ I said.
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Image: Andrew Scofield - Unsplash
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